Adventures at the Interface: User Experience Technology, Techniques, Transfer & Futures

One moment of a single user test at PARC in 1983 determined what I'd be doing for the next 19 years: designing, creating and developing user experiences in the computational medium. I believed my career would be in artificial intelligence, but that afternoon lead to a crisis in faith and my conversion experience to UE. I'll then fast-forward to how the USER Lab at IBM Almaden's lab is currently advancing the user experience in the areas of UE technology, methods and transfers. The talk winds up with some cross-cultural analysis synthesizing experiences at three different research labs -- PARC, Apple and IBM. Key concepts: UE is amazingly difficult, for all the wrong reasons; how I learned to stop worrying and love big problems; effective transfer of technology; why UE will dominate future product development.